TYAN TN70A-B8026 Hybrid Storage Server B8026T70AV16E8HR

Traditional server architectures have tied high amounts of PCIe connectivity and memory capacity to dual socket designs. The AMD EPYC platform frees server designers from this limitation, allowing us to design single-socket servers with features only seen before in dual socket platforms. The Tyan Transport SX (TN70A-B8026) allows datacenter architects to select the right sized CPU without sacrificing memory capacity, memory performance, or PCIe connectivity.

Tyan's TN70A-B8026 offers outstanding computational power for a single-socket server, with support for 8, 16, 24, or 32-Core processors with up to 64 threads. The memory capacity of the server is also incredibly high for a single socket server, able to support up to 2TB of RAM with every processor in the AMD EPYC SKU stack.

The platform is a 2U server barebones based on the outstanding Tomcat SX (s8026) single-socket AMD EPYC motherboard. The B8026T70AV16E8HR model is a hybrid storage server with support for (8) 2.5" NVMe and (16) 2.5" SATA drive bays. The server supports up to 6 PCIe slots in the back, with a pair of x24 riser cards that can both support either x16/x0/x8 or x8/x8/x8 configurations. An OCP v2.0 LAN Mezzanine provides high speed network capability, with support for either x8 or x16 network cards and speeds up to 100Gigabit Ethernet. A x16 LAN Mezzanine borrows 8 PCIe lanes from a riser slot through a MUX.

Key Features

AMD EPYC 14nm CPU

The AMD EPYC processor offers the highest possible performance from a single CPU socket, including:

8, 16, 24, or 32 core processors with 16, 32, 48, or 64 threads

Support for up to 2TB total RAM per socket on all CPU models

Support for memory speeds up to DDR4-2667

128 PCIe lanes

Dual Socket Feature Set

Traditionally, the only way to deploy a large number of PCIe devices or deploy large quantities of memory has been to select a dual-socket motherboard. This has resulted in datacenters full of underutilized and expensive dual-socket servers which had been purchased for memory footprint and I/O capabilities that had not previously been available in single-socket servers. Tyan has targeted these applications with the AMD EPYC platform by supporting up to 124 PCIe lanes and 8 memory channels in a single-socket platform. Significant savings can be had both in CPU cost and power consumption by migrating workloads to a single socket AMD EPYC platform and increasing resource utilization.

8 Hot-Swap 2.5" NVMe Drive Bays

NVMe technology offers breakthrough performance for SSDs by attaching storage devices directly to the PCIe bus, freeing them from the SATA protocol that was originally designed for slower rotational media. This technology significantly reduces storage latency and increases transfer speeds.

Previous motherboard designs were not well suited to NVMe deployment due to a lack of PCIe lanes. Each NVMe device requires a PCIe x4 link. Large numbers of these devices could not previously be deployed without expensive and bottleneck inducing switch chips or without quickly running out of I/O resources for other devices in the server. The AMD EPYC CPU is ideal for this storage technology, featuring support for 128 PCIe lanes from a single CPU socket.

Tyan's TN70A-B8026 is designed to offer the most robust support for direct attached NVMe storage of any single-socket storage server ever made. The B8026T70AV16E8HR model supports 8 NVMe drive bays while still leaving 56 PCIe lanes available across the LAN Mezzanine and PCIe slots in the rear of the chassis.

16 Hot-Swap 2.5" SATA Drive Bays

Not all applications require 24 NVMe SSDs, and the B8026T70AV16E8HR is designed with this in mind. The hybrid SATA/NVMe model deploys less PCIe Oculink cables than the all-NVMe version and uses simplified HDD backplanes. This results in a lower cost option with the side effect of freeing up PCIe connectivity for more expansion devices.

180W CPU Support

AMD’s top bin EPYC CPU supports up to 32 CPU cores and draws upwards of 180W. The TN70A-B8026 has enough thermal and power headroom to support the full AMD EPYC CPU lineup, allowing systems engineers to select the right processor for the job.

IPMI 2.0 with Redfish Support

Featuring AMI MegaRAC firmware, the TN70A-B8026 offers support for IPMI 2.0 with iKVM and the DMTF Redfish management protocol.